GIDCC draws valuable real-time insights for an agile response to COVID19 with Tableau

Uncovered real-time insights for an agile response to the spread of infectious disease

Helped GIDCC researchers and health officials make agile data-driven decisions

Promoted health literacy of residents in Gyeonggi-do

Gyeonggi Infectious Disease Control Center (GIDCC) is the first Korean regional-scale institute founded to "regionalize management of infectious disease" for more effective control on them. GIDCC is developing a system that meets the demand for infectious disease monitoring, epidemiological study, and statistical data analysis in Gyeonggi-do with the provision of professional and prompt information. GIDCC also shares infectious disease data with related institutions in real-time, such as the provincial government and health center, and makes the data available to its local residents in order to support their active efforts to prevent infectious diseases.

"We have established an effective system for managing infectious diseases using Tableau. With Tableau, various data sources related to the diseases are connected for analysis, and information useful for controlling infectious diseases is extracted and turned into dashboards to be shared with related institutions and residents. In addition, the system enabled the persons concerned inside and outside GIDCC to simplify statistical analysis and reporting and concentrate more on the work related to the set-up of infectious disease policies," said Hee-young Lee, head of GIDCC.

Tableau significantly simplified our analysis process. To conduct various studies on the prevention of infectious diseases and its spread more productively, we collect data using Tableau from the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC), National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS), National Health Insurance Service, and epidemiological studies to perform advanced analysis such as statistics.

Uncovered real-time insights for an agile response to the spread of infectious disease

GIDCC introduced Tableau first in 2015 when the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) crisis occurred, in order to analyze the outbreak of infectious diseases accurately and quickly. Since then, GIDCC has enabled its researchers to improve productivity by using the easy-to-use and simple data visualization and advanced analytics capabilities of Tableau.

To successfully control the spread of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) this year, GIDCC
has arranged the data on confirmed patients and persons contacted by patients across 31 cities and districts in Gyeonggi-do using Tableau, and analyzed it using various metrics such as the region, route of infection, gender, age and so forth.

In particular, GIDCC could develop a powerful disease monitoring system by gaining insight into the trends of COVID-19 confirmed patients and data on contacted persons in real-time, using Tableau. With a single source of view based on Tableau, they analyzed public health and epidemiological study data from various sources efficiently. They also effectively supported the tracing and management of confirmed patients and the people they have had contact with, which is key to controlling infectious diseases, by producing the result of the analysis of COVID-19 outbreak in real time.

"Tableau significantly simplified our analysis process. To conduct various studies on the prevention of infectious diseases and its spread more productively, we collected data using Tableau from the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC), National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS), National Health Insurance Service, epidemiological studies, and perform advanced analysis such as statistics," said Hee-young Lee, head of GIDCC.

Helped GIDCC researchers and health officials make agile data-driven decisions

With Tableau, GIDCC researchers and external health officials became able to make decisions more quickly based on a lot of data, when formulating policy for the prevention of infectious disease and control of its spread, including COVID-19.

GIDCC researchers efficiently perform advanced analysis like statistics, using Tableau. In addition, replacing repetitive manual tasks with Tableau from data query, extraction, and cleaning to report generation, they improved business productivity significantly. As a result, researches can focus more on establishing and implementing effective policies by using infectious disease information, instead of the traditional time-consuming analysis process.

Besides, GIDCC is effectively collaborating with Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC), the provincial government, and health centres by sharing the analysis results about COVID-19 and other infectious diseases on Tableau Server.

"As most people are concerned about the socio-economic damage caused by the worldwide spread of COVID-19 since December of last year, we support policies designed to contain the spread of COVID-19 by sharing the analysis result of COVID-19 outbreak with related institutes transparently in real-time, using Tableau. While we're making time-sensitive efforts to fight against infectious diseases like COVID-19 in these days, Tableau has allowed us to view dashboards in real time, visualizing the status of infectious disease outbreak by cities and districts in Gyeonggi-do, gender, age, and route of infection, together with data on confirmed patients and contacted persons across Gyeonggi-do. The dashboard plays a key role for the internal GIDCC researchers and external health care personnel to forecast the future trends and establish the policy for infectious disease prevention, based on the common understanding on the trends of the progress of infectious disease outbreak," said Hee-young Lee, head of GIDCC.

On the other hand, PLAN-iT, Tableau's Korean partner, provided training, advisory, and consulting services on the use of Tableau, so that internal and external GIDCC personnel can nurture their data analysis capabilities.

As most people are concerned about the socio-economic damage caused by the worldwide spread of COVID-19 since December of last year, we support policies designed to contain the spread of COVID-19 by sharing the analysis result of COVID-19 outbreak with related institutes transparently in real-time, using Tableau.

Promoted health literacy of residents in Gyeonggi-do

With Tableau, GIDCC developed various types of intuitive dashboards that show the changing trends of the number of confirmed patients across Gyeonggi-do.

All residents in Gyeonggi-do can check the various information posted on the GIDCC website. This information includes the rate of the spread of the disease over time, the appearance of disease spread in the local community, the incidence rate on the maps and graphs showing the "status of COVID-19 outbreak in Gyeonggi-do", "status of national COVID-19 outbreak", and "status of infectious disease in Gyeonggi-do".

Regarding COVID-19 outbreak in Gyeonggi-do, GIDCC updates the dashboard with various information daily, such as the cumulative status of the confirmed patients by cities and districts, the overall status of confirmed patients across Gyeonggi-do, the percentage of confirmed patients by gender and age, the confirmed number of patients by infection route (overseas inflow, unclear) and days from symptom onset to confirmation.

GIDCC plans to develop more dashboards to provide diverse and valuable information for the prevention of infectious diseases. For example, by using the new dashboard, GIDCC will be able to provide insights into infectious disease clusters, the status of discharged and hospitalized patients, daily Rt value (time-dependent Reproduction rate) which indicates infectivity in consideration of the frequency of contact with an infected person, the infectious period and evaluate the trends of positive rate changes.

"As all public health experts and residents in Gyeonggi-do can look at Tableau dashboards to understand about the status of infectious disease outbreak very easily, it helped us a lot to support the effort of preventing infectious diseases in the public and private sector," said Yeon-hui Seong, researcher of GIDCC.

As all public health experts and residents in Gyeonggi-do can see and understand Tableau dashboards about the status of infectious disease outbreak very easily, it helped us a lot to support the effort of preventing infectious diseases in the public and private sector.